Sunday, January 24, 2010

Inklet and pogo sketch

I received these a quickly after ordering them online and have been playing for a few days.


They are a going to take some getting used to. Here's the slightly longer story :

1) The stick is dumb - there's no bluetooth back to the host as its really just a miniaturized finger. The iPhone screen and the MBP touchpad are hard wired to recognize fingers, and that's what's the pogo sketch stick emulates.

2) The Inklet app for the MBP is pretty clever. Would I use this for say OmniGraffle work ? I'm not sure. I'm not sure that the touchpad on the MBP in combination with the pogo sketch is good enough to make to reasonably accurate placement of pixels. I'll give it some more time though.

3) On the iPhone, with the acclaimed Layers app the pogo sketch is fantastic.

That last leads me to think there's a fantastic iPhone app coming from Ten One Design that works over wifi/bluetooth with Inklet that gives you live on-iPhone sketching of a MacBook app (Photoshop, OmniGraffle). The applicable MBP rectangle painted on the iPhone, and two-finger operations would work as you expect to zoom in or out. There are some truly fantastic possibilities there.

Some of the technologies have already been show-cased. Google for ethernet mouse and keyboard.